TWO
The Synthesis of Devotion and
Knowledge*
THE Gita is not a treatise of metaphysical philosophy, in
spite of the great mass of metaphysical ideas which arise incidentally in its
pages; for here no metaphysical truth is brought into expression solely for its
own sake. It seeks the highest truth for the highest practical utility, not for
intellectual or even for spiritual satisfaction, but as the truth that saves
and opens to us the passage from our present mortal imperfection to an immortal
perfection. Therefore after giving us in the first fourteen verses of this
chapter a leading philosophical truth of which we stand in need, it hastens in
the next sixteen verses to make an immediate application of it. It turns it
into a first starting-point for the unification of works, knowledge and
devotion, – for the preliminary synthesis of works and knowledge by themselves
has already been accomplished.
We have before
us three powers, the Purushottama as the supreme truth of that into which we
have to grow, the Self and the Jiva. Or, as we may put it, there is the
Supreme, there is the impersonal spirit, and there is the multiple soul,
timeless foundation of our spiritual personality, the true and eternal
individual, mamaivāmśah
sanātanah.
All these three are divine, all three are the Divine. The supreme spiritual
nature of being, the Para Prakriti free from any limitation by the conditioning
Ignorance, is the nature of the Purushottama. In the impersonal Self there is
the same divine nature, but here it is in its state of eternal rest,
equilibrium, inactivity, Nivritti. Finally, for activity, for Pravritti, the
Para Prakriti becomes the multiple spiritual personality, the Jiva. But the
intrinsic activity of this supreme Nature is always a spiritual, a divine
working. It is force of the supreme divine Nature, it is the conscious will
*Gita, VII. 15-28.
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of the being of the Supreme that
throws itself out in various essential and spiritual power of quality in the
Jiva: that essential power is the Swabhava of the Jiva. All act and becoming
which proceed directly from this spiritual force are a divine becoming and a
pure and spiritual action. Therefore it follows that in action the effort of
the human individual must be to get back to his true spiritual personality and
to make all his works flow from the power of its supernal Shakti, to develop
action through the soul and the inmost intrinsic being, not through the mental
idea and vital desire, and to turn all his acts into a pure outflowing of the
will of the Supreme, all his life into a dynamic symbol of the Divine Nature.
But there is
also this lower nature of the three Gunas whose character is the character of
the ignorance and whose action is the action of the ignorance, mixed, confused,
perverted; it is the action of the lower personality, of the ego, of the
natural and not of the spiritual individual. It is in order to recede from that
false personality that we have to resort to the impersonal Self and make
ourselves one with it. Then, freed so from the ego personality, we can find the
relation of the true individual to the Purushottama. It is one with him in
being, even though necessarily partial and determinative, because individual,
in action and temporal manifestation of nature. Freed too from the lower nature
we can realise the higher, the divine, the spiritual. Therefore to act from the
soul does not mean to act from the desire soul; for that is not the high
intrinsic being, but only the lower natural and superficial appearance. To act
in accordance with the intrinsic nature, the Swabhava, does not mean to act out
of the passions of the ego, to enact with indifference or with desire sin and
virtue according to the natural impulses and the unstable play of the Gunas.
Yielding to passion, an active or an inert indulgence of sin is no way either to
the spiritual quietism of the highest impersonality or to the spiritual
activity of the divine individual who is to be a channel for the will of the
supreme Person, a direct power and visible becoming of the Purushottama.
The Gita has
laid it down from the beginning that the very first precondition of the divine
birth, the higher existence is the
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slaying of rajasic desire and its
children, and that means the exclusion of sin. Sin is the working of the lower nature
for the crude satisfaction of its own ignorant, dull or violent rajasic and
tamasic propensities in revolt against any high self-control and self-mastery
of the nature by the spirit. And in order to get rid of this crude compulsion
of the being by the lower Prakriti in its inferior modes we must have recourse
to the highest mode of that Prakriti, the sattwic, which is seeking always for
a harmonious light of knowledge and for a right rule of action. The Purusha,
the soul within us which assents in Nature to the varying impulse of the Gunas,
has to give its sanction to that sattwic impulse and that sattwic will and
temperament in our being which seeks after such a rule. The sattwic will in our
nature has to govern us and not the rajasic and tamasic will. This is the
meaning of all high reason in action as of all true ethical culture; it is the
law of Nature in us striving to evolve from her lower and disorderly to her
higher and orderly action, to act not in passion and ignorance with the result
of grief and unquiet, but in knowledge and enlightened will with the result of
inner happiness, poise and peace. We cannot get beyond the three Gunas, if we
do not first develop within ourselves the rule of the highest Guna, Sattwa.
“The evil-doers
attain not to me,” says the Purushottama, “souls bewildered, low in the human
scale; for their knowledge is reft away from them by Maya and they resort to
the nature of being of the Asura.” This bewilderment is a befooling of the soul
in Nature by the deceptive ego. The evil-doer cannot attain to the Supreme
because he is for ever trying to satisfy the idol ego on the lowest scale of
human nature; his real God is this ego. His mind and will, hurried away in the
activities of the Maya of the three Gunas, are not instruments of the spirit,
but willing slaves or self-deceived tools of his desires. He sees this lower
nature only and not his supreme self and highest being or the Godhead within
himself and in the world: he explains all existence to his will in the terms of
ego and desire and serves only ego and desire. To serve ego and desire without
aspiration to a higher nature and a higher law is to have the mind and the
temperament of the Asura. A first necessary step
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upward is to aspire to a higher
nature and a higher law, to obey a better rule than the rule of desire, to
perceive and worship a nobler godhead than the ego or than any magnified image
of the ego, to become a right thinker and a right doer. This too is not in
itself enough; for even the sattwic man is subject to the bewilderment of the
gunas, because he is still governed by wish and disliking, icchā-dvesa. He moves within the circle of
the forms of Nature and has not the highest, not the transcendental and
integral knowledge. Still by the constant upward aspiration in his ethical aim
he in the end gets rid of the obscuration of sin which is the obscuration of
rajasic desire and passion and acquires a purified nature capable of
deliverance from the rule of the triple Maya. By virtue alone man cannot attain
to the highest, but by virtue¹ he
can develop a first capacity for attaining to it, adhikāra. For the crude rajasic or the dull tamasic ego is
difficult to shake off and put below us; the sattwic ego is less difficult and
at last, when it sufficiently subtilises and enlightens itself, becomes even
easy to transcend, transmute or annihilate.
Man, therefore,
has first of all to become ethical, sukrtī,
and then to rise to heights beyond any mere ethical rule of living, to the
light, largeness and power of the spiritual nature, where he gets beyond the
grasp of the dualities and its delusion, dvandva-moha.
There he no longer seeks his personal good or pleasure or shuns his
personal suffering or pain, for by these things he is no longer affected, nor
says any longer, “I am virtuous,” “I am sinful,” but acts in his own high
spiritual nature by the will of the Divine for the universal good. We have
already seen that for this end self-knowledge, equality, impersonality are the
first necessities, and that that is the way of reconciliation between knowledge
and works, between spirituality and activity in the world, between the ever
immobile quietism of the timeless self and the eternal play of the pragmatic
energy of Nature. But the Gita now lays down another and greater necessity for
the Karmayogin who has unified his Yoga of works with the Yoga of knowledge.
Not knowledge
¹Obviously, by the true inner punya,
a sattwic clarity in thought, feeling, temperament, motive and conduct, not a
merely conventional or social virtue.
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and works alone are demanded of
him now, but bhakti also, devotion to the Divine, love and adoration and the
soul's desire of the Highest. This demand, not expressly made until now, had
yet been prepared when the Teacher laid down as the necessary turn of his Yoga
the conversion of all works into a sacrifice to the Lord of our being and fixed
as its culmination the giving up of all works, not only into our impersonal
Self, but through impersonality into the Being from whom all our will and power
originate. What was there implied is now brought out and we begin to see more
fully the Gita's purpose.
We have now set
before us three interdependent movements of our release out of the normal
nature and our growth into the divine and spiritual being. “By the delusion of
the dualities which arises from wish and disliking, all existences in the
creation are led into bewilderment,” says the Gita. That is the ignorance, the
egoism which fails to see and lay hold on the Divine everywhere, because it
sees only the dualities of Nature and is constantly occupied with its own
separate personality and its seekings and shrinkings. For escape from this
circle the first necessity in our works is to get clear of the sin of the vital
ego, the fire of passion, the tumult of desire of the rajasic nature, and this
has to be done by the steadying sattwic impulse of the ethical being. When that
is done, yesām
tvantagatam pāpam janānām punyakarmanam,
– or rather as it is being done, for after a certain point all growth in the
sattwic nature brings an increasing capacity for a high quietude, equality and
transcendence, – it is necessary to rise above the dualities and to become
impersonal, equal, one self with the Immutable, one self with all existences.
This process of growing into the spirit completes our purification. But while
this is being done, while the soul is enlarging into self-knowledge, it has
also to increase in devotion. For it has not only to act in a large spirit of
equality, but to do also sacrifice to the Lord, to that Godhead in all beings
which it does not yet know perfectly, but which it will be able so to know,
integrally, samagram mām, when
it has firmly the vision of the one self everywhere and in all existences.
Equality and vision of unity once perfectly gained, te dvandva-mohanirmuktāh, a supreme
bhakti, an all-embracing devotion
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to the Divine, becomes the whole
and the sole law of the being. All other law of conduct merges into that
surrender, sarva-dharmān parityajya.
The soul then becomes firm in this bhakti and in the vow of self-consecration
of all its being, knowledge, works; for it has now for its sure base, its
absolute foundation of existence and action the perfect, the integral, the
unifying knowledge of the all-originating Godhead, te bhajante mām drdha-vratāh.
From the ordinary point of view
any return towards bhakti or continuation of the heart's activities after
knowledge and impersonality have been gained, might seem to be a relapse. For
in bhakti there is always the element, the foundation even of personality,
since its motive-power is the love and adoration of the individual soul, the
Jiva, turned towards the supreme and universal Being. But from the standpoint
of the Gita, where the aim is not inaction and immergence in the eternal
Impersonal, but a union with the Purushottama through the integrality of our
being, this objection cannot at all intervene. In this Yoga the soul escapes
indeed its lower personality by the sense of its impersonal and immutable
self-being; but it still acts and all action belongs to the multiple soul in
the mutability of Nature. If we do not bring in as a corrective to an excessive
quietism the idea of sacrifice to the Highest, we have to regard this element
of action as something not at all ourselves, some remnant of the play of the
gunas without any divine reality behind it, a last dissolving form of ego, of
I-ness, a continued impetus of the lower Nature for which we are not
responsible since our knowledge rejects it and aims at escape from it into pure
inaction. But by combining the tranquil impersonality of the one self with the
stress of the works of Nature done as a sacrifice to the Lord, we by this
double key escape from the lower egoistic personality and grow into the purity
of our true spiritual person. Then are we no longer the bound and ignorant ego
in the lower, but the free Jiva in the supreme Nature. Then we no longer live
in the knowledge of the one immutable and impersonal self and this mutable
multiple Nature as two opposite entities, but rise to the very embrace of the
Purushottama discovered simultaneously through both of these powers of our
being.
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All three are the spirit, and the
two which are apparent opposites prove to be only confronting faces of the
third which is the highest. “There is the immutable and impersonal spiritual
being (Purusha),” says Krishna later on, “and there is
the mutable and personal spiritual being. But there is too another Highest (uttama purusa) called
the supreme self, Paramatman, he who has entered into this whole world and
upbears it, the Lord, the imperishable. I am this Purushottama who am beyond
the mutable and am greater and higher even than the immutable. He who has
knowledge of me as the Purushottama, adores me (has bhakti for me, bhajati), with all-knowledge and in
every way of his natural being.” And it is this bhakti of an integral knowledge
and integral self-giving which the Gita now begins to develop.
For note that it
is bhakti with knowledge which the Gita demands from the disciple and it
regards all other forms of devotion as good in themselves but still inferior;
they may do well by the way, but they are not the thing at which it aims in the
soul's culmination. Among those who have put away the sin of the rajasic egoism
and are moving towards the Divine, the Gita distinguishes between four kinds of
bhaktas. There are those who turn to him as a refuge from sorrow and suffering
in the world, ārta. There are
those who seek him as the giver of good in the world, arthārthī. There are those who come to him in the desire
for knowledge, jijñāsu. And
lastly there are those who adore him with knowledge, jñānī. All are approved by the Gita, but only on the last
does it lay the seal of its complete sanction. All these movements without
exception are high and good, udārāh
sarva evaite, but the bhakti with
knowledge excels them all, viśisyate.
We may say that these forms are successively the bhakti of the vital-emotional
and affective nature,¹ that
of the practical and dynamic nature, that of the reasoning intellectual nature,
and that of the highest intuitive being which takes up all the rest of the
nature into unity with the Divine. Practically, however, the others may be
regarded as preparatory movements. For the Gita itself here says that it is
only at the end of
¹The later bhakti of ecstatic love is at its roots
psychic in nature; it is vital-emotional only in its inferior forms or in some
of its more outward manifestations. that
of the
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many existences that one can,
after possession of the integral knowledge and after working that out in
oneself through many lives, attain at the long last to the Transcendent. For
the knowledge of the Divine as all things that are is difficult to attain and
rare on earth is the great soul, mahātmā,
who is capable of fully so seeing him and of entering into him with his whole
being, in every way of his nature, by the wide power of this all-embracing
knowledge, sarvavit sarvabhāvena.
It may be asked
how is that devotion high and noble, udāra,
which seeks God only for the worldly boons he can give or as a refuge in sorrow
and suffering, and not the Divine for its own sake? Do not egoism, weakness,
desire reign in such an adoration and does it not belong to the lower nature?
Moreover, where there is not knowledge, the devotee does not approach the
Divine in his integral all-embracing truth, vāsudevah
sarvam iti, but constructs imperfect names and images of the Godhead which
are only reflections of his own need, temperament and nature, and he worships
them to help or appease his natural longings. He constructs for the Godhead the
name and form of Indra or Agni, of Vishnu or Shiva, of a divinised Christ or
Buddha, or else some composite of natural qualities, an indulgent God of love
and mercy, or a severe God of righteousness and justice, or an awe-inspiring
God of wrath and terror and flaming punishments, or some amalgam of any of
these, and to that he raises his altars without and in his heart and mind and
falls down before it to demand from it worldly good and joy or healing of his
wounds or a sectarian sanction for an erring, dogmatic, intellectual,
intolerant knowledge. All this up to a certain point is true enough. Very rare
is the great soul who knows that Vasudeva the omnipresent Being is all that is,
vāsudevah sarvam
iti sa mahātmā sudurlabhah. Men are led
away by various outer desires which take from them the working of the inner
knowledge, kāmais tais tair hrtajñānāh.
Ignorant, they resort to other godheads, imperfect forms of the deity which
correspond to their desire, prapadyante
'nyadevatāh.
Limited, they set up this or that rule and cult, tam tam niyamam āsthāya, which satisfies the need of
their nature. And in all this it is a compelling personal determination, it is
this narrow need of their own nature
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that they follow and take for the
highest truth, – incapable yet of the infinite and its largeness. The Godhead
in these forms gives them their desires if their faith is whole; but these
fruits and gratifications are temporary and it is a petty intelligence and
unformed reason which makes the pursuit of them its principle of religion and
life. And so far as there is a spiritual attainment by this way, it is only to
the gods; it is only the Divine in formations of mutable nature and as the
giver of her results that they realise. But those who adore the transcendent
and integral Godhead embrace all this and transform it all, exalt the gods to
their highest, Nature to her summits, and go beyond them to the very Godhead,
realise and attain to the Transcendent. Devān
devayajo yānti madbhaktā yānti mām api.
Still the
supreme Godhead does not at all reject these devotees because of their imperfect
vision. For the Divine in his supreme transcendent being, unborn, imminuable
and superior to all these partial manifestations, cannot be easily known to any
living creature. He is self-enveloped in this immense cloak of Maya, that Maya
of his Yoga, by which he is one with the world and yet beyond it, immanent but
hidden, seated in all hearts but not revealed to any and every being. Man in
Nature thinks that these manifestations in Nature are all the Divine, when they
are only his works and his powers and his veils. He knows all past and all
present and future existences, but him none yet knoweth. If then after thus
bewildering them with his workings in Nature, he were not to meet them in these
at all, there would be no divine hope for man or for any soul in Maya.
Therefore according to their nature, as they approach him, he accepts their
bhakti and answers to it with the reply of divine love and compassion. These
forms are after all a certain kind of manifestation through which the imperfect
human intelligence can touch him, these desires are first means by which our
souls turn towards him: nor is any devotion worthless or ineffective, whatever
its limitations. It has the one grand necessity, faith. “Whatever form of me
any devotee with faith desires to worship, I make that faith of his firm and
undeviating.” By the force of that faith in his cult and worship he gets his
desire and the spiritual realisation for which he is at the moment fitted. By
seeking all
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his good from the Divine, he shall
come in the end to seek in the Divine all his good. By depending for his joys
on the Divine, he shall learn to fix in the Divine all his joy. By knowing the
Divine in his forms and qualities, he shall come to know him as the All and the
Transcendent who is the source of all things.¹
Thus by spiritual development
devotion becomes one with knowledge. The Jiva comes to delight in the one
Godhead, – in the Divine known as all being and consciousness and delight and
as all things and beings and happenings, known in Nature, known in the self,
known for that which exceeds self and Nature. He is ever in constant union with
him, nityayukta; his whole life and
being are an eternal Yoga with the Transcendent than whom there is nothing
higher, with the Universal besides whom there is none else and nothing else. On
him is concentred all his bhakti, ekabhaktih,
not on any partial godhead, rule or cult. This single devotion is his whole law
of living and he has gone beyond all creeds of religious belief, rules of conduct,
personal aims of life. He has no griefs to be healed, for he is in possession
of the All-blissful. He has no desires to hunger after, for he possesses the
highest and the All and is close to the All-Power that brings all fulfilment.
He has no doubts or baffled seekings left, for all knowledge streams upon him
from the Light in which he lives. He loves perfectly the Divine and is his
beloved; for as he takes joy in the Divine, so too the Divine takes joy in him.
This is the God-lover who has the knowledge, jñānīi bhakta. And this knower, says the Godhead in the
Gita, is my self; the others seize only motives and aspects in Nature, but he
the very self-being and all-being of the Purushottama with which he is in
union. His is the divine birth in the supreme Nature, integral in being,
completed in will, absolute in love, perfected in knowledge. In him the Jiva's
cosmic existence is justified because it has exceeded itself and so found its
own whole and highest truth of being.
¹There is a place also for the
three lesser seekings even after the highest attainment, but transformed, not
narrowly personal, – for there can still be a passion for the removal of sorrow
and evil and ignorance and for the increasing evolution and integral
manifestation of the supreme good, power, joy and knowledge in this phenomenal
Nature.
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